How I Provision My MacBook with Ansible
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of speaking at the London Ansible Meetup on the topic of provisioning my MacBook with Ansible.
(All tags.)
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of speaking at the London Ansible Meetup on the topic of provisioning my MacBook with Ansible.
While tidying up my mac-ansible repository in preparation for a talk I’m giving on it at the London Ansible Meetup tonight, I found my two-headed cow. It’s a bit of ASCII fan-art I made for the Fallout game series, whose post-apocalyptic setting has all the cows mutated this way.
I’m writing code for a little Raspberry Pi HUD I’m running in my house, project ‘Homehud’. Naturally I manage the Raspbian system I’ve installed on it with Ansible.
At YPlan we love Ansible. We use it for controlling our various AWS instances and other services, as well as with Vagrant for development environments that are in sync. This way if we want to upgrade a system package or piece of configuration, it needs only be written once in Ansible before being applied everywhere.
AWS Lambda is a hip “serverless” technology that everyone is talking about. While I find ‘serverless’ a bit of a funny name—it just means a managed environment—I like using Lambda functions for infrastructure glue or running small internal applications. Putting these things on individually managed servers of their own has always been a pain, so Lambda is a perfect fit.
I recently reduced the YPlan build time by about 30% by tuning two Ansible settings. They’re not on by default, but work in most setups, so this will make a nice short guide on going faster.
I showed this briefly in my post on merging groups and hostvars, but I thought it was worth writing a whole post on. The Minimum Viable Playbook (MVP) is the shortest, most useful Ansible playbook I have. Whenever I need to write some Ansible code and I’m not entirely sure I’m doing it right (which is often), I implement it first in the MVP so I can test it quickly. Here’s my latest iteration:
I gave a talk at the recent London Ansible Meetup on how I cleared up unexplained nameless/‘anonymous’ EC2 instances from our AWS account at YPlan. This is the blog post version of that talk, so you can follow along and stop such instances appearing on your account and sapping money!
If you’re using ansible to set a configuration file for a program, one of the most important things you can add is a validation step to ensure that you don’t hit reboot and the program refuses to launch - service down!
I was googling for information on creating round-robin DNS records in Route53 with Ansible and came across this post by Daniel Hall who’d figured out a way of merging the his host group list with their hostvars in Ansible. After a bit of emailing with him I’ve figured a way to do it without having to add an extra filter as he did originally - by digging more into Jinja2.
I was asked by some of our Data Scientists to get a few R packages onto their server, which I configured by Ansible. R seems to be bit funny compared to other programming languages because it’s package installation happens inside R code, rather than with a dedicated commandline utility.
Three useful little tidbits for using Ansible that I've come across.